[The] multi-part sculpture 01-01-2014 – 12-31-2014 is comprised of 365 cellophane wrappers from cigarette packs arranged on shelving units throughout the gallery. For over 25 years Agematsu has filled a cellophane wrapper per day with detritus collected on walks through the streets of New York. The cellophanes in the exhibition are grouped together into the 12 months of 2014, each small, vitrine-like element calendaring the ebb and flow of the city’s discarded material.

“The school (through the teacher, school discipline and architecture) makes it possible for the new generation to become attentive to some-thing, that is, to the world. Therefore, the third feature we wish to mention here is that the school makes attentive. In that sense, subject matter or things – disconnected from particular usages and positions – become very real at school. Of course not as a kind of resource, product or any other object that is occupied by and part of a particular economy. The magical event of the school is that it turns matter into some-thing, that is, something to study or to exercise. School then becomes a place and time of inter-esse, and thereby a place where the young generation is not approached as persons who have (specific, individual) needs and wish to choose, but as persons who are exposed to the world and are given the opportunity to become interested in some-thing. The school is not about calculation and choice, but about attention and becoming interested in some-thing.”

…An artist needs the courage to act alone and a community that makes such acts more bearable. One that allows us to be vulnerable, inappropriate, to go rogue, go wild, act weird, and fail.

To be amateurs, dabblers, dilettantes.

An amateur is filled with love beyond compensation, the dabblers fearlessly go places they don’t belong, the dilettantes happily lack the hidebound pretensions of experts. When we step out of the imposed confines of professionalism, we can be as open as students, able to flirt with other modes, to seek knowledge, experience, and value in our lives without limits.

Stripped away of institutional validation and the pressures of the market, we are free to be human, to be artists, to be unprofessional.